What Israel’s Political Turmoil Teaches Us About Democracy

The lesson isn’t quite what Netanyahu’s critics claim it is

Prime minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy meets the Prime Minister of the State of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu in Rome (Italy) on March 10th, 2023 (Photo by Massimo Di Vita/Archivio Massimo Di Vita/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)

“Eyes on the Right” is a newsletter devoted to analyzing and criticizing the anti-liberal right. I focus on the United States, but I also try to place domestic American events in a global context. I’ve done that by writing about Hungary’s Viktor Orbán with some regularity, and by covering last year’s elections in Italy and Germany’s arrest of far-right coup-plotters.

But so far I haven’t written anything here about Israel. Though on a couple of occasions in the weeks following the country’s legislative elections last November, I expressed concerns on the “Beg to Differ” podcast at The Bulwark about the shape of the right-wing governing coalition Benjamin Netanyahu looked to be assembling. That coalition includes far-right parties, and Netanyahu rewarded them handsomely in putting his government together.

Until now I’ve hesitated to write about the subject because I wasn’t sure I had much to add to ongoing conversations and analysis, and because the new government so quickly found itself embroiled in controversy for, among other things, trying to pass a radical reform of the country’s judicial system. I wanted to see the results of that push before weighing in. But the government’s efforts have now reached a (perhaps temporary) standstill in the face of weeks of mass protests that reached a high pitch on Sunday night after Netanyahu fired his defense minister for challenging the judicial overhaul plan.

That makes this a good time to reflect on what the Israeli experience these past few months tells us about our antiliberal moment—and the way the concept of “democracy” tends to get deployed in arguments around it.

The Imaginary Mandate

The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg does an admirable job of summarizing how Israel ended up in such a precarious place:

Israel’s Supreme Court is arguably the most powerful [senior judicial] body in the world, and experts and politicians have long called for a recalibration of its powers. But the radical wish list produced by Netanyahu’s coalition seeks not to reform the court but to neuter it, and would essentially allow the ruling government to appoint all judges and override their decisions. This plan was composed in the halls of conservative think tanks, with no input from opposition parties and no attempt to broker a national consensus. What’s more, this effort to fundamentally revise Israel’s democratic order came from a government that received less than half the vote in the last election.

That last point is the crucial one. It is extremely foolish to misread a plurality (or even a narrow majority) victory as evidence that one’s own side has a mandate to enact sweeping reform of the rules of the democratic game. But in countries with deep and narrow divisions like Israel (and our own), it will always be tempting for the winning side in elections to do precisely that. When one side wins political power, no matter how narrowly, it faces an internal drive to use the power now, to make preferred changes before it is lost. But the attempt can be hugely destabilizing—because roughly half the country doesn’t want anything like those changes to happen at all.

But politics isn’t just a contest over power. It’s also a contest over legitimacy. So the party that wins the power to make sweeping changes will tend to use that electoral victory to say not just we have the power to do this but our victory makes our effort to do this legitimate. The opposition will likewise assert not just that we have enough power (through protest) to force you to stop but your attempt to enact sweeping reforms over our objection is fundamentally illegitimate—an affront against democracy itself.  

Two Meanings of Democracy

But what do we even mean by democracy?

What the left, center-left, and many on the center-right usually mean is liberal democracy: free and fair elections, but also protections for individual rights and safeguards against those elections empowering individuals and groups that reject these liberal protections for individual rights. Often these protections and safeguards are secured by courts of law. Whether judges appeal to a written constitution and a codified bill of rights (as we have in the United States) or they rule on the basis of longstanding unwritten norms (as in Israel), the judiciary often sees its role as ensuring that democracy is synonymous with liberal democracy.  

What we’ve been seeing across much of the so-called free world in recent years is that this arrangement is only stable when a solid majority of a country’s citizens, and preferably more like a supermajority, support it. Once such support approaches or dips below 50 percent, we see something that looks an awful lot like a clash between two notions of democracy: the liberal form of democracy described in the previous paragraph and pure majoritarian democracy that in some circumstances may well be a form of illiberal democracy.

Is the latter form of illiberal majoritarian democracy, which seeks to weaken judicial bulwarks of liberalism, illegitimate?

To answer that question, let’s imagine one possible Israeli future: For reasons of national security, the country continues to lean toward the right (with a left that’s weak, divided, and electorally ineffectual). And for demographic reasons (including high fertility rates among the most rightward members of the electorate) the overall character of the right continues to shift away from the secular liberalism (or labor socialism) that has prevailed since the time of the country’s founding. This could well lead to the formation of more governments like the current one, but increasingly based on firm majority support.  

Eventually, one such government would be able to accomplish what the current one has thus far failed to do: It would curtail the power of the courts to enforce a secular liberal check on the power of illiberal parties to rule in the name of their often religiously inflected views. In this future Israel, non-orthodox Jews would have fewer rights and in some respects begin to feel like second-class citizens in Israel, as many of its Arab-Muslim citizens already do.

That last point might begin to serve as a foundation for an effective electoral counter to the right. But let’s set that possibility aside for the sake of continuing the thought experiment. In such a situation, non-orthodox Jews would have cause to be unhappy. But would they have grounds to pronounce the new order of things democratically illegitimate? I’m honestly unsure. The religiously inflected right that wins electoral majorities would be able to say we dominate the country and consistently win power, so shouldn’t the country and its laws reflect our outlook and preferences? Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be all about?

The members of this right-wing governing coalition would also likely point out that when they were firmly in the minority, the country didn’t feel like a truly pluralistic place where they had equal say in shaping its public life. On the contrary, they were living in country with a culture and political system that was thoroughly secular and substantively liberal or socialist in its policies. But now, they would be likely to insist, this has changed because the shape of the Israeli electorate as changed.

A Mortal Threat to Democracy? Or to Liberalism?

It seems to me one could respond in at least two ways to this imagined scenario.